


My Back Pages

by SegaBarrett



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 23:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14924789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Isabella is putting things into place...





	My Back Pages

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Gotham, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N #1: Title is from a song by The Byrds.  
> A/N #2: Song quoted within the fic is "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella" (but the French version).   
> TW: Offhand literary-based reference to sexual assault.

Oswald Copplepot’s chest rose and fell as he dreamed of Edward Nygma. Sometimes he dreamed of killing him, other times of kissing him, but forever Ed, lost in a whirlwind of feelings that Oswald couldn’t understand.

Sometimes he woke in the middle of one of these dreams, shouting and having to clap his hand over his own mouth. Too many servants, too much potential for disaster, all over again.

He’d make a mistake in loving Ed, he’d made a mistake in not seeing his revenge plot for what it was.

And he may have made his biggest mistake yet in teaming up with the woman he’d had killed, the woman who had wanted what was his. The woman who was, like Ed, now touting around Gotham with a whole new name and a whole new look.

The Bookworm.

***

_“C'est un tort, quand l'Enfant sommeille, -  
C'est un tort de crier si fort -   
Taisez-vous, l'un et l'autre, d'abord!  
Au moindre bruit, Jésus s'éveille. -  
Chut! chut! Il dort à merveille,-   
Chut! chut! Voyez comme il dort!”_

Ed Nygma was sleeping, too, more soundly; it was hard to tell what he was dreaming about. 

The woman in his room did not know, but she pondered it as she sang, her voice low and focused, but amused as well.

Oswald would get a kick out of this. 

Her hand was right in front of Ed’s face, her singing voice growing louder, but he didn’t stir, not yet.

She’d helped with that, of course. But no matter. 

***

_“Doucement, dans l'étable close,  
Doucement, venez un moment!  
Approchez! Que Jésus est charmant!  
Comme il est blanc! Comme il est rose!  
Do! Do! Que l'Enfant repose!  
Do! Do! Qu'il rit en dormant!”_

“What are you caterwauling about?” Oswald grumbled. “This better be good news.” 

Isabella smirked. 

“He’s out in the trunk.”

“…Who is out in the where?”

“Are you being purposely dense, Oswald?” Isabella ran a hand through her hair. “Ed. He’s in the trunk. I drugged him.”

“…And why exactly did you do that? You see, Isabelle, I heard exactly what you said, but I say that because I couldn’t believe that you were saying something that stupid! But I should have believed, because you’re an airhead!”

Isabella rolled her eyes.

“An airhead? Really?” 

She reached out and pressed her finger against Oswald’s nose.

“Just listen to me, Penguin. Is that what you’d like me to call you? Penguin?”

“I’d rather you not call me anything and just go away, but we can’t all have our wish, can we?”

“You’re a useful ally, Oswald… Penguin. I thought we had established that by now. The two of us can help one another. But there’s another important piece of the puzzle, and he’s in my trunk. And he’s also heavy – I’m not telling you to get a pat on the back. I’m asking you for help.”

Oswald rolled his eyes and hobbled out the front door to the Jeep that had been parked there. Flinging the trunk open, he gripped Ed’s legs and bit back an unintentional sigh at being this close to him, at being able to smell him at last. No, he wasn’t going to feed into that again – he couldn’t feed into that again! 

“I can’t believe he’s mooning over Leigh these days,” Oswald said, instead, trying to needle the woman who was lifting Ed’s torso.

“I suppose his type has changed,” she mused, tan trenchcoat pooling around her ankles. “But he’s not the only one.” 

They moved him into a bed in Isabella’s apartment, a canopy bed that only she could get away with and show her face in public. 

“So what is your plan, exactly? Because this had better be leading somewhere. I’m not a personals service!” Oswald declared.

“The plan is,” she said and took a step forward, “We take over Gotham. Together. The place we belong is on top.”

***

Edward Nygma’s eyes opened, and he blinked back the crust that had pooled over them. It almost seemed as if he had been crying, but that could not be true because Edward Nygma had never cried in his entire life. And the Riddler most certainly did not; wasn’t even in his vocabulary.

He sat up, slowly, and looked around the room. He didn’t recognize it, and that sent a chill down his spine that he didn’t quite know how to handle.

Suddenly he heard a voice whisper a single word, as if the voice was inside his ear itself: “Beloved.”

He jolted up with a startled sound, hair akimbo and arms in front of him, ready to fight. (Never to be caught off guard again, never to be mocked again.) A voice so similar but yet, a voice he couldn’t be hearing unless the man in the mirror was playing his chimes all over again.

His head swiveled, looking for the threat.

“Over here.” The voice was silky smooth, confident – familiar, again. His eyes centered on the woman seated on a clothes hamper, dressed in a tan trenchcoat and wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses. “That’s it. I’m here.” She waved.

Ed was about to ask again where he was, demand for her to let him go before he permanently dislocated her head from her spine before…

“Isabella.”

Maybe he was surprised at being surprised. No one seemed to die in Gotham, not for real at least, and not for long.

But he had seen her in his dreams for so long now that it seemed she could not be real; not truly. Oswald had killed her, Oswald had snapped her breaks and snapped his chances (his chances to what, exactly, he couldn’t quite articulate), but now she was back and…

“Surprise!” 

That voice he recognized more quickly, and he snapped his head around ready to kill Oswald, ready to tie him to another car hood and let his plan do the rest of the work (ready to lean in so close and, no, Ed, this was not the time to be thinking that). Ready to wrap his arms around his neck, but then he would know what Oswald Copplepot smelled like when he was close to him, and that wasn’t going to end well either.

”Are you waking up well?” Isabella asked. She was looking not at him, now, but gazing into a mirror on the wall that he had only just noticed. Maybe if he tilted his head just right, he would see the other Ed staring back at him, the one who laughed, the one who taunted, the one whose hands had stuck out of the mirror and grasped around Kristen Kringle’s neck.

“It would be better if I knew where I was.” Ed looked around, trying to ascertain it before she could answer, before they could answer. “And why you decided to bring me here.” How either one of you are alive, he answered in his head. 

“You’re here in my room,” Isabella told him, a hand resting on Ed’s shoulder. “And you’re here because we need you. Gotham is wide open for us to take over, we just need to grasp the opportunity.”

“You were never that kind of person, Isabella.”

“And what kind of person is that? You never really knew me, Ed, I’m so sorry to say.”

She wrapped the strap of the coat further around herself and observed him pensively. 

“You just wanted me because I looked like her.” She turned her head to the side and leaned down, taking a book from the bookshelf and opening it to a page. “The city of Gotham needs to read more, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think literacy is the big issue,” Ed mused. “Why don’t we just go back to how things were?” They seemed so distant; it was like he didn’t really remember her.

“I’m tired of listening to you.” 

Ed didn’t even see it coming as Isabella’s hand swiped out and shoved him off the best and into the wall. 

He could hear Oswald let out a near-silent gasp.

He wouldn’t be under her thumb, he wouldn’t let her laugh at him the way Miss Kringle had – the man in the mirror would never allow that!

But the man in the mirror was silent, now.

Maybe even he was surprised. 

***

“He really is quite disappointing sometimes, isn’t he?” Isabella asked as she let her finger run over the binding of The Handmaid’s Tale. 

“You should see his latest, greatest hits,” Oswald replied, hands clasped together over his cane and twirling it in his hands. “Ever since your waltz with the train, he’s been in one failure after another. Nowadays he’s been mooning after Leigh Tompkins.”

Isabella looked up and cocked her head to the side.

“Who is that again?”

“It’s not important. What’s important is that… we get things straight. I run my operation. You do… whatever summer reading challenge you’re planning to run over here.” 

She snorted. 

“I’m seeing the big picture, Oswald. We don’t need these divides. What I see is… a future for all of us. If we work together.”

“Okay, Kumbaya, keep dreaming,” Oswald replied. “Could we just kill Ed Nygma? Maybe that’s the answer we’re looking for in all this. Just push him out a window, and Lee Tompkins right along with him.”

Isabella sighed and flipped through her book.

“We could keep Leigh Tompkins as breeding stock,” she suggested blithely, and Oswald gave her a slightly worried look. “I was being sarcastic. You’d get it if you read the… never mind.” She put the book down. “Just keep an eye on him.”

“Why can’t you keep an eye on him? You’re the one who’s supposed to be dead, might I remind you. I kept an eye on him and he tied me to a car in some kind of weird…”

“Irony?”

“I can do with a lot less irony, Isabelle.”

Isabella picked up a book and tossed it at his head.

“Thought you liked books, Book Worm.”

“That’s my name. And anyway, it was Ordinary People. I had been meaning to get rid of it eventually anyway. Do you want it? You can have it.”

“Do I look like I spend my days reading?”

“You don’t want my answer to that.” Isabella looked over to where Ed Nygma had passed out again. “Disappointing.” She drummed her fingers against her leg.

“What, did you get struck with that virus that makes you your darkest self, too?” Oswald inquired.

“No, but that sounds like an excellent plot for a book. I would read that.”

***

Ed awoke in the cool, crisp autumn breeze, and realized that he was tied to wooden plank in the middle of an overpass.

He was not entirely thrilled with this information.

He opened his eyes wide and scanned the area, trying to remember what had brought him to this point. Clearly, someone was jealous of the Riddler, and he was going to put an end to this. Because yet again, someone had just gone too far. 

“Hey! Someone untie me!” he yelled, but over the rush of traffic it didn’t seem like anyone could hear him. Or, perhaps, no one cared. This was Gotham, after all.

The cars seemed to avoid him, but just barely. If he didn’t get up soon…

And that was when he heard it, over the loudspeakers. 

“Hello, citizens of Gotham. I am speaking to you. I am the Bookworm… Get ready for all your favorite stories to come, well… alive.”

And then a maniacal laugh.

Fade to black.


End file.
